Post Pictures of your Transformers: Autumnbots and Halloween Horrorcons!
- Thread starter Ave Destron
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Thank you, @LordGigaIce. This is the best thing I have seen all day.
You're quite welcome!
October is here! Let's get started....
Congratulations on inspiring the new thread title.October is here! Let's get started....
Hopefully this helps out our British friends...
G1/BW Family Reunions
"Backpacks and grey guns are a family tradition, mister!"
G1/BW Family Reunions
"Backpacks and grey guns are a family tradition, mister!"
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You know, I found out recently that the "Great Aunt Arcee" line was never meant to be taken literally. According to the glossary section of Beast Wars Universe, there was an earlier script draft of the Season 3 episode "Crossing the Rubicon" where Blackarachnia says to Cheetor, "I'm not your Great Aunt Arcee." Note that it's to Cheetor, not Rattrap, that she says this, despite it having been Rattrap who said the line back in the Transmutate episode. The line in "Transmutate" was originally just supposed to be a tribute to the fact that Susan Blu voiced Transmutate in that episode, and BA's later saying it to Cheetor (before the line got cut from the final version of the episode) seems to suggest that "Great Aunt Arcee" was supposed to be more of Maximal idiom than a literal person of real history. Kinda like how Americans say "Uncle Sam" not in reference to anyone's actual uncle.
The BotCon 2013 art for MW Hoist made him a medic and I had an extra Ratchet Red Cross sticker from ToyHax hanging around...
"Welcome to the dark side" and "spawn of Unicron" weren't meant to be taken literally either, but fandom fandom'd and here we are.
There's one more that isn't as widely known about: "Prime Leader" (See the Notes section).
I'd be very surprised if it WERE meant to be taken literally. I mean, nice to get official word on something or whatever (and really I love these mook publications so much I wish I had the energy to learn the language and dive in), but this is yet another case of fans making a Matrix out of a molehill.
But the real monsters were the ones we became along the way...
It's been pointed out to me just how inaccurate this comic is, if he really was the Spirit of Halloween his alt-mode would be a temporarily rented defunct department store front.
It's been pointed out to me just how inaccurate this comic is, if he really was the Spirit of Halloween his alt-mode would be a temporarily rented defunct department store front.
As I said, fandom gonna fandom. BW especially seems full of stuff that wasn't meant to be taken literally but ended up being so.
Probably because it was in that sweet spot of having the internet around where fans could circulate stuff easily but before social media so creators couldn't correct the record as publicly or in as wide spread a way.
Either way... I donno. It is what it is.
I always kinda took it to similar as the saying "My sweet aunt fanny".
I took it literally. I was nine, and Optimus Primal was confirmed to be Optimus Prime's descendent, so Rattrap being Arcee's great nephew wasn't that nuts.
When?
BM I'm pretty sure?
EDIT
It's the BM episode Sparkwar Pt. II: The Search.
Optimus Primal refers to Optimus Prime as his "ancestor."
I remember the early days in Ben Yee's Beast Wars forum where people would obsess over if Optimus Primal was really Optimus Prime, and Cheetor was Hot Rod, and so on. It got weirder as time went on even post-Beast Era, like when Car Robots came out and someone mistranslated the ladder length as the Super Fire Convoy robot height and they thought it would rival Fortress Maximus, and so on.
The oddest part of the Beast Wars times were when it became obvious that name recycling was rampant but people would STILL not believe it even after bison Bonecrusher, with posts like "Silverbolt is in Season 2, this means Airielbots! They could be birds!" or "Rampage! The Predacons will fit in perfectly!" and then it never happened. Again.
The oddest part of the Beast Wars times were when it became obvious that name recycling was rampant but people would STILL not believe it even after bison Bonecrusher, with posts like "Silverbolt is in Season 2, this means Airielbots! They could be birds!" or "Rampage! The Predacons will fit in perfectly!" and then it never happened. Again.
In "Optimal Situation", Cheetor refers to Optimus Prime as "our ancestor", speaking of everyone present in the room at the time, which were all the Maximals and Blackarachnia.
"He's our ancestor, we gotta get him repaired! Or we're goners."
My favourite cases of stuff like this came from RiD '01 (the show that got me into the online fandom) and Armada.
RiD '01 gave us the theories that Darkscream was a reformatted Starscream that Megatron had messed with to make him more obedient, Skybyte was a reformatted Skywarp promoted because he was more loyal than Starscream, and that X-Brawn and Side Burn were Brawn and Hot Rod under new names.
Armada, though, is probably my favourite. The reveal of Megatron's design for the series being somewhat Scorponok-esque had people speculating that Armada was a sequel to Western G1, specifically following up from the Rebirth, with Galvatron and Zarak having somehow merged.
Honestly? While none of these theories panned out, they weren't without merit at the time. Especially with RiD '01. While separate continuities had always existed (Marvel G1 vs Sunbow G1), the franchise hadn't really gone into full reboots yet. You had G1, BW was firmly a sequel to that, and BM was a direct followup. The idea that they'd just go with a different continuity rebooting everything wasn't really introduced yet, so it makes sense that people would try and fit RiD '01 into the existing timeline. That it featured Autobots vs Predacons really did seem like it could theoretically slip into some middle period transitioning between the G1 era and Beast Era.
Everyone had known that reboots were possible when Aramda came around... but like... it was still fun to speculate.
Which is kind of my point with this rambly trip down memory lane. None of these fan theories ended up being accurate, but they were fun. They fueled speculation, got people hyped for the shows, even if everyone's theories ended up being wrong.
We've kind of lost something with everything being so thoroughly streamlined that speculation doesn't have a chance to grow. Stuff is shown off and fully announced, and any lingering questions get answered by the brand team or the showrunners on social media.
There's no going back, social media and how it's changed creator/fan interactions has changed forever, but I still think it's worth pointing out that something has been lost.
Blackarachnia was originally a Maximal protoform
Either way... I donno man, I just read it differently. The BW Ark stuff is grounded in the idea that if history is altered the present as we (and the characters) know it will cease to be. So Cheetor referring to Optimus Prime, the leader of the Autobots from the most momentous conflict in Cybertronian history, as "our" ancestor seems fitting.
But in BM's The Search it's just Primal and (what we think is) the essence of Optimus Prime. And Primal refers to him as his ancestor. It feels more personal, more direct.
Like if I was referring to John A. Macdonald and the fathers of Canadian Confederation, I might refer to him as "the father of our country" if I was talking to a group of fellow Canucks, but I'm not going to refer to him as my ancestor in a one-on-one sense unless he actually was (point of order- he isn't, I'm trying to make a point
).Regardless... I think this fascinating. I think that had "my great aunt Arcee" been more wildely used and clearly just a well-known Cybertronian saying even 9-10 year old me would have clocked it as not being literal in Rattrap's case. That just... never happened. So I took it literally when I first heard it and nothing else in the show challenged that assumption.
Finding out what it was supposed to be (and wasn't supported as such due to rewritten or cut content) in my late 30s really isn't going to change how I've thought about the line for nearly three decades.
And yeah... I remember seeing Optimus Primal straight up refer to Optimus Prime as "my ancestor" so... the Arcee/Rattrap thing never even seemed weird.
Like I'm not trying to argue a death of the author thing or anything... but that's just how I remember taking all of this at the time
And to be frank, I'm in my late 30s, and fretting over what's official and if "Word of G-d" should count for official canon or not is a game for the teenagers and 20-somethings. I'm at the point where I just sort of roll with what I enjoy and how I personally interpret things.